St. Petersburg SKA sensationally lost to Ekaterinburg Avtomobilist and finished their participation in the current playoffs of the Continental Hockey League (KHL). Roman Rotenberg's team lost in five matches in the series and again failed to reach the Gagarin Cup.
After SKA steamrolled through Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod and reached Avtomobilist, few doubted that the army team would make it through the second round of the playoffs. However, the St. Petersburg team faced another wave of injuries and lost their top scorer at the end of the regular season, Alexander Nikishin. The 22-year-old defender, who became the team captain during the championship, was injured in the fifth game of the confrontation with Torpedo and missed the entire series against Avtomobilist. Such a loss could not but affect the affairs of SKA, and the results of the army team became an indicator of the influence and degree of importance of Nikishin for the team.
As a result, the series unfolded one hundred percent mirror all expectations. SKA lost the first three matches and found itself on the verge of a “sweep”—elimination from the playoffs with a defeat of 0-4. The situation was outwardly similar to the pair “Dynamo” — “Traktor”, where the Muscovites just “burned out” the Chelyabinsk team in a four-game confrontation. As in their series, SKA in the games with Avtomobilist surpassed the opponent in the number of shots on target and in possession of the puck in the attack zone. However, if Dynamo in the series with Traktor created a lot of really dangerous moments and got burned largely due to their poor implementation, then SKA did not create such a danger in the first three matches. But for Avtomobilist, most of the approaches to Nikita Serebryakov’s goal were truly sharp and dangerous, which is why the St. Petersburg goalkeeper had plenty of work.
After the third defeat in a row, SKA head coach Roman Rotenberg remained optimistic. He had a reason for this: it was the St. Petersburg team that was the only team in the entire history of the KHL that managed to save the series after 0-3. In the 2014/15 season, SKA beat CSKA in the Western Conference finals, and then also took their first Gagarin Cup.
“We were on fire, 0-3, winning back for the only time in the history of Russian hockey. There were different situations, we are preparing for the next game, hockey continues, the team is confident in itself, the team is in a good mood,” said Rotenberg.
And SKA took one step towards a powerful comeback, winning the fourth match of the series. The army team was close to this upon their return to St. Petersburg, where they led 4:3 after two periods of the meeting. But they couldn’t maintain their advantage in the score: first, Nick Ebert scored Avtomobilist’s fourth goal against Nikita Serebryakov, as soon as the teams entered the third 20 minutes, and then Andrei Obidin offended the St. Petersburgers at the end of the match. Even the majority and the sixth field player in the last minutes did not help the army team to return to the fight.
As a result, SKA lost in a series of five matches and was eliminated from the playoffs for the first time in ten years. off to the Western finals. In the 2013/14 season, the army team lost in the second round to Lokomotiv (2-4), having previously passed CSKA in the first round (4-0). It is symbolic that this year both army clubs finished the season at similar stages. As for Avtomobilist, the Ekaterinburg team, in whom few people believed at the very beginning of the playoffs, reached the semi-finals of the Gagarin Cup for the first time in their history. The opponent of Nikolai Zavarukhin’s team will be the winner of the confrontation “Metallurg” — “Spartak”, where after three matches in the series the Magnitogorsk club leads (2-1).
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